


happily ever after can go to waste

by corgasbord



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers, a lot of hurt and only a little comfort, everyone is sad. but especially shuuichi, mild suicidal ideations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 20:44:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10998660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corgasbord/pseuds/corgasbord
Summary: [MAJOR NDRV3 SPOILERS]A year after the end of the killing game, the survivors pay their respects to the friends (and enemies) they lost along the way.





	happily ever after can go to waste

**Author's Note:**

> so i got the urge to write post-game angst, and this was the result. it got waaaay longer than i intended, but i wanted to give attention to all of the characters, including the ones who didn't get as much spotlight in canon as they deserved. obviously it gets pretty heavy - just as a heads up, this isn't meant to be a happy fic.
> 
> (here's the [tumblr](http://corgiboard.tumblr.com/post/161066693995/happily-ever-after-can-go-to-waste) link, as usual)

It’s been almost one year since the 53rd season of _Dangan Ronpa_ ended.  

Months ago, Shuuichi marked the date on his wall calendar in bright red ink to match the blood staining his hands. It was a mere formality, of course. He couldn’t possibly forget a date that had been seared into his brain with electric burns and explosions and false memories. 

Even now, he won’t allow himself to forget, not until he joins the corpses he trampled to ensure his own survival. 

(God, why did he survive?) 

\------

“We should visit the others.” 

It’s one week before the anniversary of their escape from the killing game, and Shuuichi’s tentative statement makes the already tense atmosphere crackle. 

“Why?” Maki asks without looking up from her cup of instant noodles. Shuuichi reads the stiffness in her shoulders and determines that she already knows why, and is only daring him to say it aloud.

“Because- because it’s been a long time since we last did, for one thing,” he manages. “And, well… it’s also getting close to, um. To the date when we escaped." 

Maki’s grip on her chopsticks tightens. “So?”

“So… I was thinking that we could, you know, pay our respects.”

“We already did that. At their funerals.”

“Harukawa-san, you didn’t even go to all of the funerals.”

“I went to the ones that mattered.” 

Shuuichi purses his lips, unsure why that rubs him the wrong way. “Are you really able to think so little of them, even after all this time?”

Maki opens her mouth as if to respond, but Himiko suddenly pipes up from where she sits between them, eyes tracing the wood grain in the dining table. “I'll go.”

Shuuichi and Maki both turn to look at her in surprise. Sensing their need for an explanation, Himiko continues. “There is someone… there are a few people I wish to visit again.” 

Shuuichi doesn’t comment on her sudden correction. He knows exactly whom she’s talking about, and he figures that he’s lucky enough to get someone to accompany him at all. “Thank you, Yumeno-san. I would appreciate that.”

Maki’s fists clench so hard that he hears a soft _snap_. She breathes in, long and slow, then lets out a sigh that carries all of the exhaustion Shuuichi feels.  

“Fine,” she concedes at last. “I’ll play along. But don’t expect me to be there for everyone.” 

She gets up to discard her broken chopsticks and half-finished lunch, and Shuuichi suddenly doesn’t feel hungry anymore, either. 

\------ 

Shuuichi goes to a florist six days later to assemble thirteen bouquets, because it doesn’t feel right to visit his friends again for the first time in months empty-handed. 

(That’s a silly concern to have, isn’t it? The dead desire nothing, so why should they care whether people leave flowers to wilt on the ground their bodies fertilize?) 

He stands between walls of lilies and orchids and chrysanthemums and thinks long and hard about which kinds of flowers his friends would have liked. Some are more difficult to pin down than others, but he puts equal effort into each decision. It only feels right to do so, even for those directly responsible for his suffering. 

The florist arranges each bouquet for him based on his requests, occasionally casting him odd looks out of the corner of her eye. It’s probably because he’s ordering so many, each of them unique and carefully planned. After all, most people don’t come waltzing in to buy thirteen bouquets worth of flowers on the spot. 

Then again, most people don’t carry the weight of thirteen ghosts on their backs, either. 

“Hey, excuse me,” the florist says, and only then does Shuuichi realize that he’s been zoning out. 

“Yes?” he responds politely.

“Aren’t you one of the survivors from _Dangan Ronpa_?”

Shuuichi’s throat gets tight, too tight to answer, and the florist seems to draw her own conclusion from that. “You are, aren’t you?” she asks, grinning in a way that makes Shuuichi’s stomach churn. She seems excited, _too_  excited, just like the hordes of reporters and screaming fans that greeted him minutes after he stepped out of hell. “I remember you- you’re Saihara-kun! My younger sister followed the 53rd season really closely, and she was a big fan.”

Shuuichi swallows hard. “I get that a lot, but… I’m not him. Trust me, we’re not the same person at all.”

It’s a lie and a truth all rolled into one. He _is_  Shuuichi Saihara, but he’s not the same person who emerged from the killing game. 

“But you look so much alike,” the florist asserts, shaking her head. “You don’t need to be so modest! Really, it’s so cool to have lived through something like that.”

Shuuichi has to bite his tongue to keep from snapping that there’s nothing cool about it. There’s nothing cool about living in constant fear, or watching the people you’ve grown to care about drop around you like flies, or wishing that it could have been you instead of them.

With a shake of his head, he finally replies, “It’s not nearly as cool as it sounds.”

“Hm, if you say so.” She still sounds too cheerful for his liking, as though she doesn’t believe him, but at least she refrains from commenting on that any further as she rings him up.

Then she stops for a second. “You know, I think I might be able to get you a discount, actually-”

“That won’t be necessary,” he insists hastily.

“Oh. You sure?”

“Yes. It’s not a problem at all.” Flowers are expensive, but he has far more money than he knows what to do with, anyway.

Not that it matters. No amount of money can replace everything that he’s lost.

\------

Maki scoffs at Shuuichi as he carefully places all of the flowers he bought in the backseat of his car, leaving enough room for Himiko to sit on one side. “I still can’t believe you went to the trouble of buying all those.”

“I just- it felt appropriate, okay? Besides, I wanted to do something special for the occasion,” he defends himself.

“I think they look nice,” Himiko says. “Especially with how different they all are… You made each one for a specific person, right?”

Shuuichi nods. “You can hang onto Angie-san’s and Chabashira-san’s, if you’d like.”

“I would like,” Himiko affirms, smiling a little bit at the suggestion.

So she settles into the back of the car with two bouquets resting across her lap. Maki sits in the passenger’s seat, Shuuichi takes the wheel, and they’re off.

He hears Himiko’s voice from behind him. “Hey, not to be a downer, but… did you really have to buy flowers for _everyone_? I don’t have much room here, and I feel like there are a few people who could have gone without, anyway.”

Maki snorts. “She has a point.”

“Hey, let’s try to be fair, here,” Shuuichi says. “There’s no question that some of the others did terrible things back then. I’m not denying that. But… we also don’t know what most of them were like before they entered the game.”

(The word “game” still leaves a bad taste in his mouth. He hates calling it that, hates listening to other people call it that, hates being reminded that the gruesome deaths that plague his nightmares were someone else’s cheap entertainment.)

“So, keeping that in mind,” he continues, forcing those thoughts back into his subconscious, “I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt.”

A brief period of silence follows. Shuuichi spares a quick glance at the others, seeking a reaction, but Himiko is staring down at the flowers in her lap, while Maki’s face is as blank as always.

It’s not until a couple minutes later that Maki’s voice cuts through the heavy atmosphere. “Well, if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed in the past year, it’s that you’re still a far better person than I am.”

Shuuichi decides not to argue with that, if only because he knows he’ll never be able to convince her otherwise.

\------

They visit Rantarou’s grave first - mostly out of convenience, since it’s the closest to the sprawling cemetery’s entrance. It’s also one of the more popular monuments, judging by the bunches of flowers already placed there. Either he really does have a large family, or there’s a handful of dedicated fans still mourning his death.

Given Rantarou’s legacy, Shuuichi is more willing to bet on the latter.

Shuuichi knows that he’d been an avid follower of _Dangan Ronpa_  before he’d been a participant, and he’d found it a little strange that he couldn’t remember any of it upon exiting. So, a few months after the fact, he’d made the mistake of digging up the 52nd season out of curiosity. That was the one Rantarou had starred in, and Shuuichi still wondered what role the SHSL Survivor had played.

As the characters were introduced, Shuuichi had thought to himself that it wasn’t surprising that _Dangan Ronpa_  boasted such a large fanbase. They were all unique, all compelling in their own right, and Shuuichi wasn’t even finished with the prologue.

In fact, the biggest surprise to him was how different Rantarou was. It wasn’t with regard to his appearance; Rantarou was easily recognizable, even with a change of clothes and his hair styled differently. His title as the SHSL Explorer made sense, too, given what little Shuuichi knew about him.

No, what jarred him was Rantarou’s totally outgoing and carefree attitude. He cracked bad jokes and acted like he had nothing to hide, and Shuuichi realized that the only thing connecting the person on the screen and the serious, cryptic boy he’d known was the name Rantarou Amami.

To this day, he still doesn’t know whether Rantarou got an interesting arc or made any valuable contributions to the plot. He couldn’t get past the first chapter.

The last thing he remembers is the discovery of the first body, bludgeoned to death just like Rantarou was. It made his vision blur and his head swim with blood, blood that he could still smell like it was fresh, trickling down the side of Rantarou’s face and forming wet, sticky clumps in his hair.

Then Himiko had been there, gently shaking his shoulders and calling his name, and he noticed how damp his cheeks were and how much his chest hurt and how hard it was just to breathe. She had taken him into her arms for a bit, and all he could do was tremble like a leaf and berate himself internally for being so _weak_  - weaker by far than Rantarou had been.

He hasn’t gone anywhere near _Dangan Ronpa_  since. Even now, he can’t recall what it was that made him love it so much, enough that he wanted to die.

(His love for _Dangan Ronpa_  has long since disappeared, but it didn’t take his dreams of dying with it.)

Rantarou is one of many mysteries that Shuuichi was never able to solve, but his sacrifice is enough for Shuuichi to be certain of one thing: he was just as determined to end the killing game as the rest of them, and just as undeserving of his untimely demise.

He gently takes one of the bouquets from his arms and lays it on Rantarou’s grave with the others. “Sorry for doubting you,” he whispers. “We won’t forget what you did.”

\------

Maki is holding Kirumi’s bouquet, and Shuuichi points it out to her so that she can lay it against the headstone. The SHSL Maid is significantly less popular than the last person they visited, but Shuuichi tells himself that it’s only because she didn’t have a following previously. He doubts that many of the others were as loved as Rantarou was to begin with.

It couldn’t be because she was a murderer, or because she had died too soon to be memorable. After all, Shuuichi himself was quick to forgive her, and not to forget her.

Really, how could anyone forget everything she had done for them? How could anyone forget all of the favors she’d carried out, all of the meals she’d painstakingly prepared, all of the support she’d given to them without complaint? Kirumi gave and gave and gave until there was nothing left of herself to give, so Shuuichi can’t fault her, even knowing how ready she was to see every last one of them dead.

He had been the first to command her to run from the death sentence he’d given her. He had been the last to carry the guilt for damning her to that fate.

“... It’s strange,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “After all this time, I still can’t blame Toujou-san for doing what she did.”

“Me neither,” Himiko says. “She was kind of like… the group mother. She did a lot for us.” Her face falls as she adds, “I have to wonder how much she truly cared about us, though.”

“I think she did care about us. She just cared more about the outside world… or what she thought it was, at least,” Shuuichi reasons.

Maki shrugs. “Makes sense. What are thirteen lives, compared to an entire country?”

_Almost insignificant. Chump change_ , Shuuichi thinks.

But then, that's all they were from the very beginning, and the de facto prime minister herself was no exception.

\------ 

There’s already a bouquet of flowers sitting atop Ryouma’s grave when they come to it. Shuuichi can’t tell how long they’ve been there, but they look pretty fresh. 

“Looks like someone else was thinking of him, too,” Maki comments.

Shuuichi nods. “I wonder how he would feel about that. I think… I think he would have been happy, if he’d known that there was someone waiting for him after all.”

Maki purses her lips, more solemn than usual as she puts Ryouma’s flowers down next to the other ones. For a minute she stands there, stiff and silent, before stepping away with her eyes trained on the grass.

“Hey,” she starts, “do you think…” Then she trails off, brows knitting. “No. Nevermind.”

Shuuichi regards her with concern. “What is it, Harukawa-san?”

“Nothing. It’s dumb.”

She won’t look at him, and it occurs to Shuuichi that maybe there’s guilt lingering in her mind, too, even if she refuses to admit it.

“Harukawa-san… you’re not blaming yourself for what happened to him or anything, are you?”

Maki sets her jaw. “No. It’s nothing _that_  dumb. I mean, how was I supposed to know how he’d react to his motive video? I didn’t even watch it.” She sounds a little too defensive for Shuuichi to be convinced, but he decides not to point that out.

“Anyway,” she continues, “I just started thinking… wondering if he’d have let himself get killed so easily if he hadn’t seen it.”

Ryouma’s motive video was by far the cruelest, in Shuuichi’s opinion. He can’t imagine what it must have felt like for Ryouma to be desperately seeking a reason to live, only to be told outright that none existed, that his life was completely and utterly meaningless, that his death wouldn’t make a difference to anyone because he didn’t _have_ anyone.

Now he can’t help pondering what could have happened if things had gone differently. Could Ryouma have survived with them until the end? Could he have forgiven himself for the past that haunted him? Could he have eventually found the reason he was searching for?

“I don’t know,” Shuuichi says after a while. “I guess there’s no way to tell, now.”

\------

The first time Himiko begins to crack is when they visit Gonta’s grave.

Her perpetually curled lip wobbles as she puts his bouquet down, and Shuuichi thinks he sees her draw her sleeve across her eyes quickly before standing.

“He didn’t deserve to die,” she says, sucking in a shaky breath. “He said that he did. But he didn’t.”

Shuuichi could argue that none of them deserved to die, but he knows that the other two wouldn’t accept that, and discord is the last thing that they need right now. So he simply nods his agreement, bowing his head.

“He was there for me after Angie and Tenko…” She pauses, swallowing hard. “After they died. He did what he could to cheer me up, like… like he knew I needed a friend. Like a true gentleman would.”

“He was a gentleman,” Shuuichi says. “He was always trying to do whatever he could to help us… out of everyone there, he probably belonged in a killing game the least.”

Poor, sweet, gullible Gonta. His love for bugs was surpassed only by his love for his friends, yet that love became his undoing. He burned for it, burned for _them_ , and didn’t even curse the true orchestrator behind his crime as his torso split open and his skin charred and the flames danced on mercilessly, climbing higher and higher around him.

Himiko sniffs. “Do you think that the flowers will attract bugs?”

The question comes out of the blue, prompting Shuuichi to look over at Himiko with his eyebrows raised.

“I know we have no idea what Gonta was like before,” Himiko says, “but maybe… maybe he’d like that.” She falls quiet for a few seconds, then shrugs. “I dunno. I’m just… thinking out loud, I guess.”

Shuuichi gives her a small, melancholy smile. “Well, if he was anything like the Gonta-kun we knew, then I’m sure he would. In fact, he’d probably be glad that more of his friends are coming to visit him.”

“Ha… yeah, you’re right.” Himiko rubs at her nose and attempts a wobbly smile. “In that case, the flowers were a good idea, huh?”

“I’d like to think so, yeah.”

It’s only a matter of seconds before a bumblebee flits over to the bouquet, circling one of the daffodils. Himiko’s expression brightens, and Shuuichi can’t help but feel just a little validated.

\------

Miu leaves them all at a temporary loss for words, just as she did in life. Her cackle still echoes in Shuuichi’s head and grates on his eardrums like nails on a chalkboard, but retrospection has made him realize how forced it always sounded.

Miu may have been widely disliked for her perversion, but no one thought as little of her as she did of herself.

“I don’t think we ever gave her enough credit,” Shuuichi finally remarks. “She really did do a lot for us, and she never asked much in return.”

“Yeah… I guess you’re right,” Himiko agrees. “She said a lot of nasty things, and made me uncomfortable most of the time, but… I could have been nicer to her.”

“We all could have been nicer to her,” Shuuichi says.

Maki mumbles, “Some more than others.” Shuuichi can’t tell whether she meant to be heard or not, so he doesn’t acknowledge it. He has a pretty good idea of who the offenders are already, anyway.

Still, it stands to reason that perhaps recognition was what Miu needed all along. For all the discomfort she brought him with her rude nicknames and allusions to body parts he didn’t have, she wasn’t a bad person, and there’s no denying what a valuable asset she was to the group overall. Besides, if she’d felt that she had a place among them, she may not have attempted murder.

Or maybe that would have been too much to hope for. As she had always told them, they were all just small fries, mere drops in a bucket. She had her sights set on greater things.

In any case, he’s weary of hypotheticals. He dedicates enough of his thought process to them on a regular basis, and there’s no point in dwelling further on all that he could have, should have, would have done to change things.

So he directs an apology at the grave, one that sounds automated even to him, because the chipped gears turning in his brain won’t tell him what else to say.

\------

Himiko stands as the last surviving member of the Gifted Inmate Academy’s Student Council, so it’s only right that she’d be the one to give flowers to its late president.

She rubs at her reddened eyelids and drops to her knees, gently laying Angie’s bouquet before the headstone. Then she settles, legs still folded beneath her. For several minutes, she remains in that position, head inclined silently, and neither Maki nor Shuuichi have the heart to disturb her. She's probably praying, or meditating. Or maybe she thinks that if she concentrates hard enough, she'll be able to hear the voice of God.

When she does speak up, her voice is hoarse and barely audible. “I want to believe… I want to believe that Angie went to heaven.”

Shuuichi and Maki exchange a glance. An unspoken conversation passes between them, and Shuuichi immediately knows that Maki is thinking the same thing he is: Himiko is the only one among them who could ever harbor such a sentiment.

It isn’t that Shuuichi thinks Angie was a bad person. After all, Angie was among the few with the initiative to try uniting the group. She was also one of the most effective at doing so, even if those outside the Student Council didn’t approve of her means. The strength of her faith was enough to carry her through every tragedy, all the way up until her own unfortunate end, when her blood ran on the floor of her research room like spilled paint.

But Shuuichi and Maki don’t believe in God or heaven. Shuuichi doesn’t think he ever could, after everything he’s witnessed. If such a higher power existed or cared at all for pitiful lives like theirs, then the killing game would never have happened in the first place.

He doesn’t say that, though. He couldn’t bring himself to, not after seeing how wholly Himiko has invested herself in what Angie lived and died for. Instead, he simply says, “I’m sure she did.”

When Himiko doesn’t reply, he steps over to kneel by her side, gently setting the bouquets in his arms aside. “I’ll pray with you, if you’d like.”

Himiko looks up at him, eyes wide and glassy. Then, with a grateful smile, she nods and takes his hand. “Thank you.”

Both their heads turn in shock, however, when Maki settles on Himiko’s other side. She keeps her eyes on Angie’s grave, not saying anything, but she doesn’t need to for Shuuichi to understand what she’s attempting to convey.

Himiko must understand, too, because after a minute she takes Maki’s hand in her free one and closes her eyes. “Thank you… both of you. I’m sure that this makes Angie really happy.”

They spend a while on the sacred ground with their hands linked, uttering quiet prayers to a God that only one of them believes in, and Shuuichi gets the strangest inkling that this is what Angie would have wanted all along.

\------

When they reach Tenko’s grave, it becomes clearer than ever that Himiko is barely holding it together. She lays the last bouquet in her arms at Tenko’s headstone with trembling hands, and then she stays there, murmuring something unintelligible under her breath - another prayer, Shuuichi assumes.

Eventually, she runs her palms over her wet cheeks and addresses the other two. “It’s taken a long time, but I think… I think I’ve become the kind of person I can be proud of. That Tenko would be proud of.”

“I’m sure she would be proud of you, too, Yumeno-san,” Shuuichi assures her.

He means it, too. Himiko is almost a completely different person from the inexpressive, apathetic girl he met at the beginning of the killing game. While she still has trouble making her feelings known at times, she’s put noticeable effort into getting the most out of every day, as though she’s living in the place of her loved ones.

“Yeah?” Himiko tosses a brief, sad smile back in his direction. “I hope so. And… and I hope she’d forgive me, too.”

Shuuichi shakes his head at her. “Yumeno-san… There’s nothing you need to be forgiven for.”

“There is,” Himiko says. “She was always there for me, and I took her for granted. I acted like I didn’t care about her until it was too late. But Tenko… Tenko was so kind that she would probably forgive me, even if I feel like I don’t deserve it.”

Tenko was indeed kind, even to Shuuichi, whom she claimed to hate for being a boy. Her aggression and her compassion were equally matched, and she had fought tooth and nail to defend the honor of her fellow girls, especially the one she’d fallen in love with.

Now the object of her affection is left to bear the weight of her sacrifice.

But Himiko is strong, stronger than she realizes. As strong as Tenko, even. Strong enough to stand on her own two feet without crumpling under the impact of the countless adversities she’s faced.

(Shuuichi wishes he could be half that strong.)

Himiko appears to hesitate before speaking again. “Hey, could- could you guys keep going without me? I just want to be left alone with Tenko for a little while.”

Shuuichi can hear the emotion saturating her voice, and figures that she needs the privacy. “Sure,” he says. “We’ll come back for you in a bit.”

Himiko just nods, leaving nothing for Shuuichi to say or do but leave her be and hope that at the end of the day, she will have at least forgiven herself.

\------

It’s probably for the best that they left Himiko behind there, because Shuuichi doubts that she has any respect to pay to her best friend’s killer.

None of them ever had much respect for Korekiyo, really. His keen intellect was offset too much by his concerning detachment from the rest of humanity. Shuuichi always got the sense that in his sharp golden eyes, they were all mere test subjects, things to be observed.

He still doesn’t know exactly how close Korekiyo had gotten to his twisted goal. It doesn’t matter, he supposes, because the dozens of innocent girls he slaughtered were never real.

“Have you ever wondered what made him like… like _that_?” Shuuichi asks, even though he doesn’t expect much of an answer.

“Not really,” Maki says. “I don’t have any reason to think about anything that irrelevant.”

“Ah.” Shuuichi looks away, a little sheepish. “I was just curious because, well… our personalities were all fabricated, right? So we don’t know what Shinguuji-kun used to be like. And that makes me wonder what inspired Team _Dangan Ronpa_ to make him into someone so horrible.”

Maki shrugs. “Who knows. Maybe he was horrible from the beginning. Or they could’ve been trying to go for the opposite of what he was originally like.”

“Maybe,” Shuuichi echoes. There’s something ironic about a person whose name means “just and pure” performing such unjust and impure deeds. That could have been a reason for it, too - it’s exactly the kind of sick joke he would expect from the people who broadcasted thirteen murders worldwide. “That… really is unfortunate.”

“You know, you think too much,” Maki tells him. “It’s too late to be worrying about that kind of shit now.”

Shuuichi sighs. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

He doesn’t dignify that train of thought any further. After all, what’s the point of trying to understand fiction?

\------

Kiibo’s grave is more of a placeholder than anything else, because there had been nothing left of him to bury after the end of _Dangan Ronpa_. Any pieces of him that remained would have blended right in with the rubble.

Somehow, that makes his needless sacrifice even more sad.

“I wish I could understand why he had to die like that,” Shuuichi says. His eyes skim aimlessly over the patterns in the granite of the headstone, as if they somehow hold the answers.

“Because the world decided he should,” Maki replies, as stoic as ever.

Shuuichi shakes his head. “But he made sure we were alive, then voluntarily self-destructed. You saw it, too. I still don’t think that was the will of the viewers.”

“Didn’t I just get done telling you that you think too much?” Maki chides.

“I know. I know I do, but I can’t help it.” His grip on the remaining flowers tightens. “I can’t help thinking that he didn’t need to die. Maybe we all could’ve gotten out just fine if he hadn’t blown himself up like that. Maybe we didn’t have to lose him. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but… later on, I couldn’t get the possibility out of my head. We could’ve had one less dead friend.”

(One less dead friend, one less grave to visit, one less bouquet to deposit, and one less brutal death to replay itself over and over again behind his eyes whenever he closes them.)

“You don’t know that, though,” Maki points out.

“Exactly,” Shuuichi says, “that’s the problem.”

Maki pauses. Then, she fixes him with a piercing red glare and asks coldly, “And what could you have done to save him?”

Shuuichi can only stare at her, taken aback. What could he have done?

He thinks back to when the world was crumbling around him. He remembers choking, dust obscuring his vision, filling his nose and mouth and lungs. He remembers his ears ringing with a cacophony of deafening crashes and blasts. Massive chunks of rubble fell away from the Gifted Inmate’s Academy and landed mere meters away from him as he stood paralyzed, rendered completely helpless yet again. He watched blood spray from beneath an enormous hunk of concrete and thought, _I’m next. This is it. This is the end._

Then the blasts stopped, and he looked up to see Kiibo, hovering far above him. Shuuichi could have sworn that the robot was looking directly at him before he’d pressed one of the buttons on his chest and flown off, higher and higher, propelling himself straight into the artificial sky and going out in a shower of sparks and burnt scrap metal.

Nothing but absolute, deafening silence reigned after that.

That’s the response he gives Maki, too, and she says, “Exactly. There was nothing any of us could have done.”

Shuuichi lacks the willpower to argue with something that he knows is true, so he doesn’t. Just as before, he can do nothing - nothing but hope that at some point, Kiibo knew just how much his existence was worth.

\------

Shuuichi’s eyes start stinging before he even reaches Kaito’s grave, and he rubs hard at them in an attempt to stop the tears threatening to well up. He’d promised Kaito that he wouldn’t cry, and he intends to make good on that promise this time, disregarding all the times he’s already broken it. He owes that much to the boy who motivated him to stay alive.

Unsurprisingly, Maki is better at keeping it together than he is. She betrays no emotion as she places Kaito’s bouquet on the ground, but there’s a distant look in her eyes that tells Shuuichi that her thoughts are elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Shuuichi digs his teeth into his lower lip, using the pain to ground himself just as Kaito had grounded him. He knows that if he allows his mind to wander, to remember all the time they spent sprawled out beneath a blanket of fake stars, he won’t be able to maintain his composure.

“You’re not gonna cry, are you?”

Startled, Shuuichi directs his gaze to Maki, who’s still staring at Kaito’s headstone.

“That’d really tick him off, you know. If he could see you right now, he’d probably crawl out of the ground just to punch you again.”

Shuuichi knows Maki well enough by now to realize that this is the closest she usually gets to comforting him outright. “If only,” he says with a laugh, quiet and strained, because he would take a hundred more blows to the face if it would bring Kaito back. 

Maki snorts. “You really are a masochist.”

“Yeah,” Shuuichi says, “I guess I am.” He must be, to go to the trouble of coming all the way here just to reopen all of his old scars.

Maki doesn’t seem surprised at his resignation. “... He did care about you, though. Even if he had a weird way of showing it.”

“I know.” A tired half-smile tugs at Shuuichi’s lips. “He cared about both of us- all of us.”

He lifts his face, letting it catch the rays of the late afternoon sun. An endless expanse of blue stretches around them on all sides, dotted with cottony white wisps, and Shuuichi absentmindedly wonders whether Kaito would have liked cloud watching as much as he did stargazing.

“You really loved him, didn’t you?” he adds without thinking.

She’s silent for so long after that Shuuichi begins to worry that he made her mad. Then, her blunt reply comes. “So did you.”

Shuuichi doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t need to.

\------

Maki doesn’t follow Shuuichi to his next stop. She tells him that she and Himiko will be waiting in the car while he takes care of the rest, and he doesn’t argue, because he knows she’s already visited the only person she thought it worth tagging along for. Plus, to her credit, she stuck around for longer than he expected her to.

So when he kneels at Kaede’s grave, there’s no one to point out the tears welling, beading on his eyelashes and straying down his cheeks. He tells himself that it’s fine to let himself slip up just this once, because Kaede wouldn’t mind. She might have scolded him, but in the end she would have wiped his tears and forgiven him for his weakness, just as she forgave him for condemning her to a horrific death.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks, taking a slow, rattling breath. “I’m sorry I couldn’t uncover the truth in time. I’m sorry I let you and so many other people die. And I’m sorry that- I’m sorry that I’m still so fucking _pathetic_ , even after all this time.”

The apologies run off his lips until he’s out of air, until he’s almost as blue in the face as she was, and even then he continues to recite them in his head as though they’ll even make a difference at this point.

( _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry-_ )

He has to remind himself how to breathe again - inhale, exhale, repeat. Then he wipes his face clean on his sleeve and tries to piece himself back together. To think that he was on the verge of falling apart yet again the moment he was left alone… God, he really _is_  pathetic.

But Kaede wouldn’t want him to visit her just so that he could wallow in self-pity the whole time. So he sniffs hard and forces himself to smile, if only a little bit. “Ha… I was so busy apologizing that I almost forgot to thank you,” he says. “So… thank you, really. For everything you did for us. And for believing in me, too, even when I didn’t deserve it.”

There are plenty of other things he could say. _I miss you. I love you. I wish you knew._

Instead, he rises from the grass, letting the words die in his throat.

\------

Shuuichi stares wordlessly at Kokichi’s grave for a while, unable to identify exactly what he’s feeling.

He mulls it over a bit as he stares at the inscription on the headstone without really reading it. Is it sorrow? Not quite, he thinks, because that would be too strong an emotion. Guilt, perhaps? Well, he’s been feeling that all day, so it’s nothing new.

No - _pity_. That’s the word he’s looking for. He feels pity because Kokichi died utterly alone, leaving nothing behind and ensuring that not even a single person would mourn him.

Shuuichi clears his throat. “I guess I owe you an apology, too.”

It feels odd to say that, given all of the heinous things Kokichi did. Kokichi was an insidious, manipulative liar, responsible for the deaths of two people. Maki and Himiko never forgave him for his indelible sins, and if they were here they would probably balk at Shuuichi for even considering it.

But they’re not here, so Shuuichi can clear his conscience in peace.

“You did horrible things, and we all hated you for it. _I_  hated you for it. But now… now I think I finally understand. You hated what was going on just as much as- no, maybe even more than the rest of us, didn’t you? So you took the most drastic measures to stop it.”

The memory of Kokichi’s crooked grin flashes through his mind, as vivid as though only a day had passed instead of a year. Kokichi had worn that same unfaltering grin when Shuuichi pointed an accusing finger at him and spat that he was pathetic. Kaito had everyone on his side, and Kokichi had no one, and Shuuichi had hurled those truths at him like poisoned arrows, and Kokichi had still marched willingly to his death for the people who so despised him.

“What you did still can’t be justified,” Shuuichi continues. “But… for what it’s worth, I don’t hate you anymore.”

That means next to nothing at this point, but saying it eases the ache in his chest, just a little.

\------

It would be easy to leave Tsumugi’s bouquet at her grave and walk away without sparing it a second glance.

He doesn’t. The prospect is tempting, but it would make him a hypocrite after preaching about forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. So he stands there in spite of his exhaustion, grappling for something to say to the girl who facilitated his friends’ murders without remorse.

Several minutes pass, and all he can come up with is “Why can’t I hate you?”

Once upon a time, he had felt nothing but hatred for her. It had boiled in his blood and made every inch of him itch for vengeance. He’d made it clear that he’d never forgive her, and she had just laughed and laughed and _laughed_  at his anguish, at his fury, because all his fighting words did was boost the show’s ratings.

But the grim satisfaction that came with her penance faded before long, leaving behind the same depression that’s clung to him for the past year.

His desire for the mastermind’s blood was sated, and he made it out of the killing game alive with two of his friends, and he was rewarded for it with more money than he could ever spend. It should have been enough for him to move on and rebuild his life from there. It should have been enough to make him forget. But it wasn’t. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here, bitter and emotionally spent and asking questions to people who can no longer answer them.

He tries to find the answer himself instead. Maybe he can’t hate her anymore because she can’t be held fully responsible for her crimes - she wasn’t the only member of Team _Dangan Ronpa_ , after all, or even a high-ranking one. She was one of many replaceable employees willing to stake their lives on the game, and her passion drove her to pour all of her effort, her love, even her very soul into it.

It suddenly hits him that he was once the same way. He had once stood in front of a camera and babbled excitedly about how _Dangan Ronpa_  was his life, and how he’d do anything for the opportunity to kill and be killed.

“... I see,” he mutters. “Maybe it’s because we used to be so similar.”

When he finally turns to leave, he swears he can hear her laughing at him still, taunting him from a place he can’t reach.

\------

Shuuichi releases a heavy sigh as he sits back in the driver’s seat of his car. He doesn’t comment on the redness of Maki’s eyelids or the shimmering trails on Himiko’s cheeks, because he’s sure that he looks a mess, too.

“Are you all right?” Himiko asks as Shuuichi moves to get back on the road.

“Yeah,” he lies. “You?”

Himiko nods. “Mhm. I… I kinda feel a little bit better, actually.”

Shuuichi forces a smile. “That’s good. What about you, Harukawa-san?”

Maki doesn’t respond. She’s staring out the window with her temple resting against the glass, uncaring that the edge of her seatbelt is digging into her neck. Shuuichi can’t tell whether she’s spacing out or deliberately ignoring him.

Regardless, he decides not to press her for an answer. Her silence says enough.

He starts to wonder whether time really does heal all wounds. If that’s the case, then how long will it take for his to close? How long will he keep finding new ways to blame himself? Will he ever be able to see blood again without panicking? Will he one day be able to make peace with the specters that haunt his dreams?

(How long will it take for him to visit his friends again without thinking about joining them?)

But these aren’t the kinds of thoughts he should entertain while driving. He gives his head a quick shake and rubs his eyes once more before returning his focus to the road ahead.

_You’ll be okay. One of these days, you’ll be okay_ , he tells himself, and he does his best to mean it.

**Author's Note:**

> i feel depression in this chili's tonight
> 
> some things to note on the side:  
> \- i don't know shit about flowers, but apparently daffodils can symbolize chivalry, which obviously fits gonta  
> \- the stuff i mentioned about pre-game rantarou was based entirely on headcanons  
> \- i'm not even sure what my ship bias was here bc i ship shuuichi with almost everyone  
> \- this is the longest thing i've ever written


End file.
